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10 Principles for a High-impact Life

You want to have an impact. Your efforts are your investment. The return on your investment is the impact. The impact is the energy transferred, the energy that you generated transferred to someone else.

Identify your higher purpose. Why you do what you do. Choose to continuously ask yourself what your higher purpose is, and how it is showing up in your life. As you get older and as your life circumstances change, your understanding of and your ability to work with your higher purpose changes. This is the life energy that is yours to work with.

Connect to your higher purpose. Everything you do can be connected to and aligned with your higher purpose. This is a deliberate and daily practice. Most of us forget most of the time to connect to our higher purpose. You can teach yourself to connect more and more continuously. You can learn to connect more and more of what you do, all day long, to your higher purpose. This is the purposeful energy that is yours to guide.

Connect the best in others with your higher purpose. In everything you do, you need others to bring their unique contributions, combining them with your unique contributions to achieve your higher purpose. This is the power of the mirror that invites the best in each person to contribute to the harmonic of the energy that is yours to invite.

Choose the vibrancy you experience. Every experience you have consists in a set of relationships, with yourself, with another, with a group, with nature’s creative process, and with spirit’s source of creative energy. Sometimes you experience low vibrancy. Sometimes you experience high vibrancy. When you experience higher vibrancy, you experience greater trust, greater energy, and more of your own creativity comes through, with others.

Consciously choose the agreements about your interactions. The outcomes and experiences we have are driven by our interactions. Our interactions are determined by a set of agreements. We unconsciously accept most of these agreements. We consciously choose some of them. We can choose to see and make conscious the agreements we want. Agreements that engage healthier interactions, leading to better experiences and outcomes. This is the power of the chooser, the alignment of intention, attention, emotion, and volition.

Strategically leverage your actions. You can simply do something. Or you can do things in a way that is much more efficient, getting far more output for the same input. You can also work with the underlying dynamics of a system to get far greater outcomes from your actions. And, you can coordinate the work of others with you, in the influencing of multiple underlying dynamics, to shift the behavior of a whole system. This is the dynamic energy of systems. The power of choosing the form your energies will take as they are transformed for others to receive.

Connect and communicate virally. You can connect with others in ways that they can work with the purpose and level of your agreements, using the power of networks to greatly scale the number of people connecting to your higher purpose. To connect with others, you need to understand what agreements they are able to see and work with, what they are able to grow into, the higher purpose they serve. Knowing this, you can use this power of connection, of extension in space to others, of inviting others into contributing to a shared higher purpose.

Increase the resilience of your contributions. Your ability to continually impact the world, towards your higher purpose depends on a balance in the resources you need and the resource you have. That determines your resilience. You can be ever-more efficient in the resources you need to have the impact. You can also increase your access to the resources you have through alignment of principles 1-7. You can increase your impact resilience, the power of extending your impact over time.

Define the reach of your efforts. Your impact is the energy transferred from your efforts to others. How you define the energy received by others defines the impact you can have. Your impact is a function of (1) how many people you transfer to the energy too, (2) the geographies you can reach, and (3) the continuity of that reach. Everyone everywhere everyday. That is the greatest impact. Is the impact continuous? Does it reach people in all of the different cultural, social, economic, political geographies you want? Does it reach all of the people in each of those geographies? This is the power of system definition, the clarity of who is to be impacted and how they are impacted, the power of access to impact for those often marginalized.

Align principles 1-9. Most people tend to pay little to know attention to these 10 principles for a high-impact life. Very few pay attention and align them. It requires paying attention. Attention to their deeper purpose, to their inner experience, to the outer structures they engage in, and to the impact their life has. That is a lot of paying attention. Is it hard? In that it takes more attention. Maybe. Is it harder to have a low-impact life? In the fatigue, boredom, and lack of purpose. Maybe. It is a choice. A choice to work with each of these principles, and a choice to align them, towards a much higher impact. To work towards strengthening the field of agreements. This is the power of alignment, of choice.